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With all those advantages, why don't French cultural offerings fare better abroad? One problem is that many of them are in French, now merely the world's 12th most widely spoken language (Chinese is first, English second). Worse still, the major organs of cultural criticism and publicity — the global buzz machine — are increasingly based in the U.S. and Britain. "In the '40s and '50s, everybody knew France was the center of the art scene, and you had to come here to get noticed," says Quemin. "Now you have to go to New York."
Another problem may be the subsidies, which critics say ensure mediocrity. In his widely discussed 2006 book On Culture in America, former French cultural attaché Frédéric Martel marvels at how the U.S. can produce so much "high" culture of lofty quality with hardly any government support. He concludes that subsidy policies like France's discourage private participants — and money — from entering the cultural space. Martel observes: "If the Culture Ministry is nowhere to be found, cultural life is everywhere."
Other critics warn that protecting cultural industries narrows their appeal. With a domestic market sheltered by quotas and a language barrier, French producers can thrive without selling overseas. Only about 1 in 5 French films gets exported to the U.S., 1 in 3 to Germany. "If France were the only nation that could decide what is art and what is not, then French artists would do very well," says Quemin. "But we're not the only player, so our artists have to learn to look outside."
Certain aspects of national character may also play a role. Abstraction and theory have long been prized in France's intellectual life and emphasized in its schools. Nowhere is that tendency more apparent than in French fiction, which still suffers from the introspective 1950s nouveau roman (new novel) movement. Many of today's most critically revered French novelists write spare, elegant fiction that doesn't travel well. Others practice what the French call autofiction — thinly veiled memoirs that make no bones about being conceived in deep self-absorption. Christine Angot received the 2006 Prix de Flore for her latest work, Rendez-vous, an exhaustively introspective dissection of her love affairs. One of the few contemporary French writers widely published abroad, Michel Houellebecq, is known chiefly for misogyny, misanthropy and an obsession with sex. "In America, a writer wants to work hard and be successful," says François Busnel, editorial director of Lire, a popular magazine about books (only in France!). "French writers think they have to be intellectuals."
Conversely, foreign fiction — especially topical, realistic novels — sells well in France. Such story-driven Anglo-Saxon authors as William Boyd, John le Carré and Ian McEwan are over-represented on French best-seller lists, while Americans such as Paul Auster and Douglas Kennedy are considered adopted sons. "This is a place where literature is still taken seriously," says Kennedy, whose The Woman in the Fifth was a recent best seller in French translation. "But if you look at American fiction, it deals with the American condition, one way or another. French novelists produce interesting stuff, but what they are not doing is looking at France."
French cinema has also suffered from a nouveau roman complex. "The typical French film of the '80s and '90s had a bunch of people sitting at lunch and disagreeing with each other," quips Marc Levy, one of France's best-selling novelists. (His Et si c'Etait Vrai... , published in English as If Only It Were True, became the 2005 Hollywood film Just Like Heaven starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo.) "An hour and a half later, they are sitting at dinner, and some are agreeing while others are disagreeing." France today can make slick, highly commercial movies — Amélie, Brotherhood of the Wolf — but for many foreigners the taint of talkiness lingers.
The next act
How to make France a cultural giant again? One place to start is the education system, where a series of reforms over the years has crowded the arts out of the curriculum. "One learns to read at school, one doesn't learn to see," complains Pierre Rosenberg, a former director of the Louvre museum. To that end, Sarkozy has proposed an expansion of art-history courses for high schoolers. He has also promised measures to entice more of them to pursue the literature baccalaureate program. Once the most popular course of study, it is now far outstripped by the science and economics-sociology options. "We need literary people, pupils who can master speech and reason," says Education Minister Xavier Darcos. "They are always in demand."
Sarkozy sent a chill through the French intelligentsia last summer by calling for the "democratization" of culture. Many took this to mean that cultural policy should be based on market forces, not on professional judgments about quality. With more important adversaries to confront — notably the pampered civil-service unions — Sarkozy is unlikely to pick a fight over cultural subsidies, which remain vastly popular.